Integrating Candidate Assessments to Your Recruitment System

Your recruitment system takes into account all the elements and factors involved in the hiring process. This requires the co-action or the interplay of methodologies, relationships, and utilities to set an effective and efficient standard in the workflow.

Part of this is overseeing the end-to-end recruiting process from sourcing down to on-boarding. However, there is one step that most companies fail to integrate: candidate assessments.

Benefits of Candidate Assessments

The main objective is simple: to avoid the bad hires as much as possible. According to Fortune Insiders, such an employment mistake is very costly (about 30% of an employee's potential first-year earnings!) and cuts productivity.

By integrating candidate assessments (whether technical or general) into your recruitment system, you can have a more refined selection of talents. You get to go beyond resumes and phone screenings and place emphasis on tests that will let you identify qualified ones easier.

In addition to that, you can:

• Get better hires by fully understanding their skill level, strengths, weaknesses, etc.
• Make a more objective screening by having a set of criteria
• Save valuable time by screening fewer candidates than usual
• Improve employer branding by showing how serious you are in finding the best fit
• Improve retention rate by employing serious and well-matched candidates

As mentioned, these can be technical or role-specific. It can also be more general and let you get to know the individual’s values, personality, innovative thinking, problem-solving ability, and many more on a professional level.

Types of Assessments

Technical Assessments

Role-Specific Skills

These tests are crucial in determining how well a candidate can do their job. For example, the IT industry usually has an aptitude test that evaluates their knowledge of coding and programming languages. The marketing industry, on the other hand, has copywriting tests or strategic-planning simulations.

Software Skills

Every professional should be able to use software well to be efficient in their daily routine. This can vary from something general like the Microsoft Office suite to applications more advanced depending on profession (i.e. Adobe Suite for art-related jobs). Create exercises that showcase how adept they are using such tools.

Language Proficiency

Is your company international? It might be wise to do a proficiency test if it requires the employee to interact internally or externally using a certain language. This ensures cohesiveness and relevant information won’t get lost in translation.

General Assessments

Cognitive

As a company, it’s essential to have a similar thought process. Cognitive assessments are excellent in gauging one's mental ability in regards to their attention to detail, situational judgment, numerical reasoning, spatial reasoning, and more. The hospitality industry uses this a lot.

Personality and Culture Fit

As HR, you know how important this is. Having a healthy company culture and workplace diversity can bolster the workforce and motivate employees to do better. You can do specific tests like the Enneagram, or you can simply ask their likes and dislikes, which already tells you a lot about a person’s character.

How to Integrate Candidate Assessments to Your Recruitment System (+ key persons involved)

Integrating this into your recruitment system is relatively simple. It needs a tight collaboration between the HR team and the hiring managers.

Consult with Hiring Managers

First and foremost, you need to know what the hiring managers are looking for. Do they want someone who is already a skilled engineer? A creative with a specific artistic style? Or someone who can speak Chinese fluently?

Once you determine all these, you can begin arguably the hardest part: the planning.

Plan hiring process carefully

Take your time into overseeing a standardized hiring process from start to finish. You must consider where to post your job ads because some careers have specialized job boards. You can read our article about this.

After that, you contemplate how you will do everything. Create concrete steps, set priorities, and delegate tasks to your recruiters so that the entire flow is stable and organized. 

When creating the test itself, use lots of references and be sure that it leads you exactly to what the hiring manager needs.

Inform applicants about the assessment

This is vital so that applicants can prepare accordingly and yield the most optimal result. You can do a phone screening first, or you can indicate on the email body that they have to fill-out a test. You can even go as far as giving practice tests, too. This will allow them to know what to expect and omit possible mishaps on instructions, network connections, etc.

Recruitment software like Manatal makes this easier with its email marketing integration. You can connect your Google or Outlook/Office365 to contact prospects directly without the need for any third-party software.

Just get the email address of the applicants and conveniently shoot them a message from there!

Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate

This is where the final decision comes in. Make a careful evaluation of the candidates with the hiring managers, and see if they are a fit or not.

Through Manatal, collaboration is easy. You can invite hiring managers to the portal, and they can leave comments or notes to update you with their decision. You can even use it to follow-up on them if they haven’t responded already.

Give feedback to candidates

Lastly, be sure to give feedback to candidates. Regardless if it’s positive or negative, you have to let them know about your decision. This is only fair to them so that they won’t get their hopes up, and it will pinpoint what they are good at and what they need to improve on. 

Applicants will surely appreciate this. And, in a way, this healthy response also boosts employer branding!

Candidate assessments will reveal more stuff about the candidates, which you can never really judge solely based on paper. With the right preparation and planning, integrating this into your recruitment system will surely reward you with a better hire and higher ROI.
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